The Tragedy of the Timesheet

There’s a line in Death of a Salesman that’s been rattling around in my head lately.

Willy Loman, the protagonist, is convinced that success comes from being “well-liked.” He tells his sons that a man who creates a “velvet ripple” of popularity can never fail. Just smile, be charming, and the world will open up for you.

“Be well liked and you will never want.”

I keep thinking about that line. Not because I’m worried about Willy Loman. Because I’m worried about consulting.

The Story We’ve Been Selling

For decades, the management consulting industry has run on a narrative of scarcity.

Business acumen is rare. Institutional knowledge is proprietary. Strategic insight requires expensive MBAs with expensive suits presenting expensive slide decks in expensive conference rooms.

The pitch has always been: We’re the smartest people in the room. And because you can’t easily verify that claim—because the data was siloed, the analysis was opaque, the recommendations required interpretation—you paid a premium for the assurance.

That assurance was manufactured. The pristine deck. The confident delivery. The invocation of the firm’s prestigious brand heritage. The partner who golfs with your CEO.

I’ve been in those rooms. I’ve delivered those decks. I’ve watched clients nod along, not because the insight was revelatory, but because the performance was convincing.

That’s the “smile and a shoeshine.”

What Happens When the Smile Stops Working

Here’s the thing about AI that most consulting industry think-pieces get wrong.

The disruption isn’t that AI can write a deck. The disruption is that AI strips away the need for the performance.

When a client can query their own internal LLM to synthesize millions of documents in seconds—when they can generate a “Market Entry Strategy for a Neo-Bank in Brazil” that’s 80% complete before the first partner call—the performative value of the consultant evaporates.

The theater is no longer necessary to produce the insight.

The client doesn’t need someone to look like they’re doing sophisticated analysis. They can see the analysis happening in real-time, transparently, for a fraction of the cost.

I used to think AI was a tool for consultants.

Now I think AI is a mirror showing consultants exactly how much of their value was smoke.

The Billable Hour as Coping Mechanism

The most obvious symptom of this denial is the billable hour.

The business model is predicated on a linear relationship between time and value: the longer a problem takes to solve, the more valuable the solution is deemed to be.

This made sense when information gathering was labor-intensive. When you had to physically interview employees, scour libraries, aggregate disparate facts into coherent stories. The slide deck was an artifact of that labor—proof that the work had been done.

But AI breaks the equation.

Studies show AI can reduce the time required for consulting tasks—writing code, drafting reports, synthesizing market research—by 50% to 90%. If a firm adopts AI and reduces a 100-hour project to 10 hours, and continues to bill by the hour, they destroy 90% of their revenue. If they don’t adopt AI, they’re undercut by competitors who do.

It’s the impossible choice.

And most firms are responding by pretending they don’t have to make it. Using AI to make slightly better slide decks. To summarize meetings slightly faster. Sustaining innovations designed to preserve the old model rather than confront the new reality.

I’ve watched firms bill for inefficiency. Charge for the “heavy lifting”—the manual data crunching, the slide formatting, the travel—when an AI agent could do it in minutes.

The billable hour isn’t a business model anymore. It’s a coping mechanism. A way to avoid confronting that the thing we’re selling might not be scarce.

“You Can’t Eat the Orange and Throw the Peel Away”

There’s another Loman moment that cuts closer to the bone.

When Willy visits his boss to ask for a non-traveling job, he’s confronted with the reality that his “contacts”—the mayors and businessmen who used to know him—are dead or retired. His relationship capital has evaporated.

“You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit!” he cries.

He’s arguing that his past investments in relationships should yield a permanent annuity of respect and income.

Legacy consulting firms make the same argument. The Partner model is built on “relationship capital.” Partners are compensated because they own the client relationship—they’re the rainmakers who golf with the CEOs, who have the “contacts.” The firm argues that its institutional knowledge (the peel) justifies its continued incumbency.

But AI is profoundly indifferent to tenure.

An AI agent evaluating a procurement bid doesn’t factor in loyalty. It evaluates efficiency, accuracy, and cost. As clients increasingly adopt AI-driven procurement—as they build their own internal “consulting brains”—the value of the external relationship depreciates.

The client realizes they can extract the fruit (the specific answer to a specific problem) via an API or a specialized boutique, without paying for the peel (the massive overhead, the partner profits, the brand legacy).

The “orange peel” metaphor is devastatingly accurate. The peel represents the high fixed costs of the partnership structure—the bench of consultants, the prime real estate, the global brand marketing. In an era of AI abundance, clients refuse to pay for the infrastructure. They want the fruit. Unbundled.

Advisors vs. Builders

Here’s the bifurcation I’m watching play out.

On one side: the Advisor. The pure strategist. The person who sells vision, direction, narrative. Slides. Intangible goods highly dependent on the “story.”

On the other side: the Builder. The person who ships. The firm that delivers working AI agents, fine-tuned models, Python scripts, automated workflows. The deliverable isn’t a deck—it’s a product.

Revenue from pure strategy is flattening. Revenue from implementation and digital transformation is growing. The gap is widening.

Why? Because AI commoditizes the generic strategy. If an LLM can give you a structurally sound answer to your basic strategic question in seconds, the “value add” of the human consultant providing that framework collapses to near zero.

The Advisor who only talks, who only produces slides, is becoming Willy Loman talking to his refrigerator—generating noise that no one is willing to pay for anymore.

In Death of a Salesman, Willy represents the “pure salesman”—the man who sells nothing but his personality. He creates nothing. He builds nothing.

But there’s another character: Charley. He’s not flashy. He’s not “well-liked” in the way Willy wants to be. But he’s successful. He owns a business. He deals in reality.

The Charley of consulting is the firm that builds.

The Throat to Choke

So what remains scarce when AI makes expertise abundant?

Accountability.

AI can’t be fired. AI can’t be sued. AI can’t sit in front of a Board of Directors and take responsibility for a $10 billion merger that failed.

The human role shrinks to this core function. The “throat to choke.” Senior partners will remain valuable not because they do the work (AI does that), but because they vouch for the work. Their wet signature on the strategy provides the psychological insurance the client needs.

This distinguishes the “smile and a shoeshine” (superficial charm) from actual trust. Charm is cheap. Trust is expensive. Clients will pay a premium for a human who can navigate the politics, the emotions, the ethical gray areas that AI can’t touch.

But that’s a very different job than what most consultants are trained to do.

The Requiem

The analogy between Willy Loman and legacy consulting holds up with uncomfortable precision.

Both rely on a “story” of prestige that’s increasingly disconnected from economic reality. Both face a market that’s indifferent to past loyalty. Both suffer from a fatal inability to adapt their self-image.

Willy can’t stop being a “Salesman.” Legacy firms can’t stop being “Strategy Advisors.”

The moral of Death of a Salesman is that “attention must be paid” to the reality of one’s condition. Willy dies because he lives in a dream.

The consulting firms that are struggling—the ones that feel the ground shifting under them—are the ones that continue to live in the dream of the 20th century. The dream of the billable hour, the information monopoly, the prestige economy.

The firms that survive will be the ones that stop worrying about being “liked” and start worrying about what they can build. They’ll dismantle the pyramid, discard the expensive peel, and embrace abundance to deliver fruit faster and cheaper.

In the final scene of the play, Linda Loman wonders why there are no mourners at Willy’s funeral.

“But where are all the people he knew?”

The consulting industry risks a similar fate: fading into obsolescence with no one to mourn its passing. Because the clients already moved on to the builders who gave them the future—instead of the salesmen who kept selling them the past.

What I’m Watching

I’m not claiming to have all the answers here. I’m watching this unfold in real-time, from inside the industry.

But a few patterns are emerging:

The shift from hours to outcomes. Firms that figure out value-based pricing—getting paid for the $100M problem solved, not the 5 minutes it took to solve it—will pull ahead.
Specialization over generalization. The “smart generalist” is most vulnerable to AI. Deep, niche vertical expertise is harder to replicate.
Build something the client can’t build themselves. Proprietary data, algorithms, or integrations that are genuinely superior to what open-source models can provide.
Stop selling air. If the deliverable is just a deck, you’re already losing.

The Salesman is dying.

The Builder is what comes next.

At least, that’s where I’m placing my bet. Ask me again in a year.